h other headlong over its broad back;
shrieking all the while with the frantic, uncontrollable laughter of
happy children freed from all restraint. Men, women, and children all
mixed in this wild, watery spree; and as to any of them getting drowned,
the idea was utterly absurd.

When we got it alongside, and prepared to cut in, all the chaps were
able to have a rest, there were so many eager volunteers to man the
windlass, not only willing but, under the able direction of their
compatriots belonging to our crew, quite equal to the work of heaving
in blubber. All their habitual indolence was cast aside. Toiling like
Trojans, they made the old windlass rattle again as they spun the brakes
up and down, every blanket-piece being hailed with a fresh volley of
eldritch shrieks, enough to alarm a deaf and dumb asylum.

With such ample aid, it was, as may be supposed a brief task to skin our
prize, although the strange arrangement of the belly blubber caused
us to lift some disappointing lengths. This whale has the blubber
underneath the body lying in longitudinal corrugations, which, when
hauled off the carcass at right angles to their direction, stretch
out flat to four or five times their normal area. Thus, when the
cutting-blocks had reached their highest limit, and the piece was
severed from the body, the folds flew together again leaving dangling
aloft but a miserable square of some four or five feet, instead of
a fine "blanket" of blubber twenty by five. Along the edges of these
RUGAE, as also upon the rim of the lower jaw, abundance of limpets and
barnacles had attached themselves, some of the former large as a horse's
hoof, and causing prodigious annoyance to the toiling carpenter, whose
duty it was to keep the spades ground. It was no unusual thing for a
spade to be handed in with two or three gaps in its edge half an inch
deep, where they had accidentally come across one of those big pieces
of flinty shell, undistinguishable from the grey substance of the belly
blubber.

But, in spite of these drawbacks, in less than ninety minutes the last
cut was reached, the vertebra severed, and away went the great mass of
meat, in tow of countless canoes, to an adjacent point, where, in eager
anticipation, fires were already blazing for the coming cookery. An
enormous number of natives had gathered from far and near, late arrivals
continually dropping in from all points of the compass with breathless
haste. No danger of going